25 Years of New Zealand Travel

Last updated on: 13/07/2018

Transport and how people travel play an important role in life. Transport links our homes, our families, our work places and our social lives. Transport helps us to get where we need to be, and enables us to get what we need to carry out our daily lives.

How we travel and our travel needs depend on many things. Age, work, stage of life and geography all play their role, but that role can change. Life stages and external influences such as available technologies can bring new choices and shift old behaviours.

You can’t measure such changes without a tool. One such tool is the New Zealand Household Travel Survey. Run by the Ministry of Transport in a range of forms between 1989 and 2014 it has measured the travel of average New Zealanders by surveying 2 days of travel for everyone in randomly selected households.

This document introduces us to 25 years of New Zealand travel – a selection of what has changed, what hasn’t, the current picture, and some of the stories behind what we see. It tries to look beyond the New Zealand average, to a range of people at different stages of their lives. All of these are valuable insights into how New Zealanders go about their lives, and what they might do in the future.

Spreadsheets

Personas [XLSX, 39 KB]: As well as the usual graphs and statistics, we have individual stories highlighted, to help you understand more about what the statistics may mean or look like at a personal level. This spreadsheet provides the data behind those stories.